With the expansion of services and emerging applications being offered over the Internet, a dramatic growth in bandwidth utilization induces a quick depletion of network resources over a limited shared link. Simultaneously, excessively sporadic or bursty Internet Protocol (IP) traffic dominates the network and are constrained to the bottleneck of a pre-provisioned bandwidth commonly encountered at the backbone links, where a capacity mismatch usually exists. Such a capacity mismatch occurs when a backbone link has a lower capacity implementation than the total capacity of the access links aggregated to it. This scenario causes a substantial buildup of queues for access into a particular type of network bandwidth-requiring resource that could lead to data loss or dropped request/s if the buffers spill over. Since the basic IP architecture is not inherently capable to support quality of service (QoS), admission control and resource allocation become the fundamental issues that beset today's carriers or service providers in delivering a certain guaranteed quality of service (QoS) as a service differentiator and a measure of service availability. This QoS commitment may take the form of a minimum rate, known as a Committed Information Rate (CIR), while permitting the subscribers to burst up to some maximum rate, or Maximum Information Rate (MIR), latency, jitter, packet loss measures, or any combinations thereof.
Typical packet-based network architectures implement static provisioning of resources that tend to be insufficient in handling increased traffic flows. This inefficiency is due to over or under-allocated bandwidths as exemplified during events of aggressive bandwidth competition at the core transport network. Coincidently speaking, without the use of congestion control and fairness, the objective to maintain a level of QoS while improving or maximizing both resource utilization and network revenue will unlikely be realized.
It is therefore imperative to have improved methods and systems for delivering quality of service through an implementation of dynamic management of network resources with a feedback control mechanism in a packet-based network architecture. This scope of invention is an extension to U.S. Patent pending for approval, submitted by Dos Remedios, et. al., entitled “Methods and Systems for Providing Quality of Service in Packet-Based Core Transport Networks”, with application number U.S. Ser. No. 11/463,908 filed on Aug. 11, 2006.